C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Sport

It is the first that ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies.

Shakespeare.

Detested sport,
That owes its pleasures to another’s pain.

Cowper.

’Tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petar.

Shakespeare.

He learn’d the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,
And how to scale a fortress or—a nunnery.

Byron.

Ah, nut-brown partridges! ah, brilliant pheasants!
And ah, ye poachers!—’tis no sport for peasants.

Byron.

Thick around
Thunders the sport of those, who with the gun
And dog, impatient bounding at the shot,
Worse than the season desolate the fields.

Thompson.

See from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings;
Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.

Pope.

I bear to the wisdom of Sir Philip Sidney, who said that next to hunting he liked hawking worst. However, though he may have fallen into as hyperbolical an extreme, yet who can put too great a scorn upon their folly, that, to bring home a rascal deer, or a few rotten conies, submit their lives to the will or passion of such as may take them under a penalty no less slight than there is discretion shown in exposing them.

F. Osborn.

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